Frustrated about tech
What got me into tech and software were articles in the 90s and early 2000s about achievements from Xerox PARC, Cray, IBM Research, the novelty of Windows 95, the resurrection of Apple with products that came from a magical world, the space shuttle etc. There was an air of innovation, out there ideas, really big picture thinking. Instead what I'm seeing today is incremental improvements and a fear of thinking big. Instead we focus on services that maybe work or don't work (WeWork, Wag), annoying things (e.g., optimizing ad generation and delivery) or downright scary paths (personal data harnessing and selling, estimating people's reactions). Did we lose our way and succumbed to optimize for TC or was it always like that and I was naive enough to ignore it?
Did you just grow up?
If growing up means seeing only a bleak picture, yes.
I've gotten a lot more cynical with age. So looks like it does mean that.
As others mentioned, there’s plenty of tech advancement in tradicional sectors (Health, HR, Automotive, Hotel, Transportation, etc) There’s also a lot of new computing developments in existing companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, etc
While the developments may be impressive from a technology POV, I can't ignore the fact that they serve business purposes that I don't consider them a step forward. Facilitating traveling and consumerism are hardly humanity's greatest achievements.
It’s a good point. There are big improvements in embedded devices, computing enabling more advanced ML deployment, 5G, photo/video processing etc. But it’s unlike a revolution like the internet. It takes a generation of people taking everything we have til now for granted, so that they can actually be excited about some shit like AR Pokémon or holographic video calls.
Tech got extremely boring in late 90s and early 2000s before mobile. Now it’s boring again. It goes in cycles
It could also be that things are more privatized now. I believe government sponsored projects are down from what they were in the past. So there may be less big publicly visible advancements now adays. That and the news is obsessed with easy to process click bait. For example, You’ll hear about Elon musk breaking the window on the cybertruck long before you ever see an article on Lockheed Martins new Gen 3 GPS satellites .
Time to apply to Zoox 😉
There is a lack of innovation and you are not wrong about that. We've entered into another era where tech is dominated by monopolies and the cult of the CEO has blinded investment. You may or may not know or remember this but Google was only allowed to survive because Microsoft was facing down massive anti-trust lawsuits.
Counterpoint: Tesla, SpaceX, Waymo, AWS (which enables most startups), tons of biotech startups, tons of healthcare startups The pictures are bigger.
I was mostly focusing on the big ones, but yes, you are right.